John Sinclair - It's All Good
It's rare that I get to post on consecutive days with this anymore, given that I am trying to keep it to 4 or 5 posts a month, but we're making an exception this weekend.
We're also making an exception in that today I'm sort of tooting my own horn, and posting something that comes from my personal lifetime highlight reel.
All I can say is when you are dealing with exceptional people like today's 81st birthday honoree, you gotta make proper exceptions.
Hey is anyone getting high right now reading this? Having a toke on the good herb, and not hearing the police coming through the open window in the kitchen with a heretofore-unacronymized SWAT variation, complete with tactical gear straight outta of the My Lai massacre?
Those of us of a certain vintage remember a time -- not really all that long ago at all -- when you could get 20 years in solitary, just for a joint if you were Left enough, poor enough or unwhite enough.
The jails are still unfortunately full of people who found themselves checking all three of those boxes.
A good way to say it would be that the difference between Then and Now is back in those days, all but the bravest and most committed had to hide.
These days? Fast forward just a generation, and no one can hide... from the countless legal cannabis dispensaries that have some of the greatest and most potent pot ever grown, doing business on just about every streetcorner in state after state.
How'd it get this way so fast? It's even legal in a bunch of countries now, not just in the US.
Who are the pioneers who put their galaxy-grade, platinum obsidian balls on Pharaoh's Forever Chopping Block so that you could blithely inform that hazy kid behind the counter No, sonny boy! I said the Grapefruit/Northern Lights Kush!
Most of the people benefitting from these innovations may never know his name, but John Sinclair -- born this day in 1941 and starting (and finishing) shit ever since -- might be their alpha/omega figure.
It'd take a week of screed to recount what this guy has been involved with in his wild lifetime, but he's been in the thick of Real Life for a long, long time.
In addition to pioneering the legalization that's sweeping the nations, he was one of the driving forces behind the legendary Detroit rock-as-revolution outfit The Motor City Five (MC5). In his own right, a published poet and spoken word recording artist. A noted record producer and archivist. An ultra-decorated broadcaster. He's done it all but sell popcorn in the stands, folks.
So yeah, one morning 17 years ago it was Easter Sunday, and I was prepping my radio show of then -- I've had a few -- when I got this phone call from the Program Director.
What followed was a day beyond the Imagination for your occasionally-humble narrator, two out of twelve hours of which is documented here for the annals of history.
EN & John Sinclair
Berkeley Liberation Radio Studio
Oakland, California USA
3.27.2005
01 EN & JS part one
02 EN & JS part two
Total time: 2:06:28
disc break goes between tracks 01 & 02
BLR's Emperor Nobody spends an Easter Sunday evening talking and playing music (much of it John's own) with activist/poet/broadcaster John Sinclair
digital recording, sourced from the pre-broadcast feed in the studios of Berkeley Liberation Radio, 104.1 FM
a joint production of Phase 4 Radio & The John Sinclair Radio Show
tracked & slightly remastered -- with missing disc-flip song restored -- by EN, September 2022
645 MB FLAC/direct link
645 MB FLAC/direct link
Yes, I once spent the better part of an Easter Sunday in the East Bay with the only person I'll ever know for whom John Lennon wrote a song, and named it after them.
So when you light up tonight, say a hearty Happy Birthday for a guy who was in the stair for breathing air, but who was let outta there to further dare scare the doctrinaire into sharing the fare.
I'll be back in a few days, maybe, and I've got a tasty pumpkin patch of posts for The Tenth Month lined up.
But before we burn those bridges when we get to them, I hope you'll enjoy those two bucketlist hours of my life when I turned my show over to our birthday dude, fasho one of our age's all-time hall-of-fame provocateurs and a super-sweet guy to boot.--J.
